There's good news here too, on several fronts; starting with people who've only got SD televisions and DVD players.
When you shoot a video in HDV, the process starts with the light-sensitive element in the camera. Sony's HDV camcorders actually have three of them and, together, they gather four or five times the amount of visual data that a conventional DV camera would. Which means that if you down-convert the image to SD, it will probably look better than if it started life in SD. There may be exceptions to this: if your down-conversion technology isn't very good, then the final image will suffer. Canopus down-conversion tools give you the very best quality, so this isn't a worry. It's also fair to say that if the original footage was shot using a very high-end SD camera (especially one with an expensive professional lens) then down-converted HDV might not look quite as good, although it will look different.
But if you compare the output from a high-end consumer DV camcorder with that from an HDV camcorder down-converted using Canopus technology, then the HDV-sourced footage will almost certainly look better. This means that everyone, whether they've got HD display equipment or not, can benefit from HDV acquisition (i.e. shooting) and editing.
To see HDV in its full resolution, there are several easy options as well – starting with flat-screen televisions. Plasma and LCD screens often come with a resolution that is higher than standard NTSC. Some don't, and this is something to watch out for carefully if you're thinking of buying one. If you see a plasma screen that's significantly cheaper than everything else, it probably won't be suitable.
To appreciate HDV, you will need a resolution of at least 1280 by 1080. Lower resolutions like 1080 by 768 will show an improvement over NTSC but it's better to go for more pixels, if possible. The ideal resolution is 1920 by 1080 but, although these screens do exist, they are expensive.
There's no real reason why HDV video shouldn't be distributed as HDV. It uses a compression format (MPEG-2, long-GOP) that has all the characteristics of a distributable format. But the files will still be quite big — they're the same size as DV files. With DV, or any SD format, for that matter, it's normal to convert to Standard Definition MPEG-2 long-GOP, which is the format used for DVDs.
You might think it would be asking too much to compress HDV even more, so that you could fit reasonable amounts of it onto a DVD sized disk, but, remarkably, that's exactly what is possible. There are compression formats available that are even more efficient than MPEG-2. Some of them are part of the MPEG-4 specification. But the most easily available, and easiest to distribute, is Windows Media Video. Using WMV, it's quite possible to fit a whole HD feature film on a DVD-R. Incredibly, data rates as low as five megabits/second can give good results. Of course this depends on content, and if there's a lot of movement you'll have to use a higher data rate. Canopus gives you all the tools you need to create WMV files that anyone running Windows will be able to view on their computer (as long as it's fast enough).
For the future: it seems likely that WMV will be a 'required' format for high definition DVDs, which means that every DVD player capable of playing High Definition DVDs will be able to play the WMV files that you create. Unfortunately, until the new generation of DVD players arrives, then you're restricted to playing Windows Media 9 files on a computer.
Until then, there's an alternative, which is probably never going to be a worldwide standard, but is so cheap to buy that you might want to think about it for the short term. It's called HVD, which stands for “High-clarity Video Disk”. Luckily the pictures it produces have a much better quality than the name of the format. HVD is a Chinese technology that comes in the form of a very low-cost player capable of playing back high-definition material recorded onto a DVD-R disk. The compression used is MPEG-2, just like HDV, and the results are surprisingly good for such a low-cost system. Nobody expects the HVD format to be around for decades, but it's so cheap and effective that it's worth thinking about if you want to get your HDV movies seen right now.
Next Section > Video Connections with HDV
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